Counsellor, heal thyself

Tamsin Dean reviews Only Human by Susie Boyt

Susie Boyt's subject sounds unpromising - a warts-and-all portrait of a middle-aged widow. But the book's insight and wit keep the reader (at least, this reader) interested. Marjorie Hemming is mixed up, well-meaning and so exasperating that in real life I would duck if I saw her coming. She is still in mourning for her husband who was killed in an accident just before the birth of their child.

Nearly 20 years later, Marjorie works as a counsellor in a marriage guidance clinic. She has retained the idealised view of matrimony of a young bride and has a mission to drag couples back from the brink of break-up. "I believe in the institution of marriage. I feel almost as though I am employed by marriage, but I treat each marriage, rather than the individuals within it, as my patients." However, many of her clients know that their marriages are beyond repair, and become increasingly irritated with Marjorie's obsessive interference; meanwhile her student daughter escapes from her smother-mother by moving out. Marjorie loses her grip on the job, on her own behaviour and on life itself. This psychotherapist cannot heal herself.

Although short on action and plot, the account of Marjorie's gradual disintegration is full of illuminating ideas about loss and loneliness. Boyt is a bereavement counsellor herself and reproduces the techniques of non-judgmental passivity. Marjorie sets her clients infantile tasks as homework and refuses to take offence. No wonder one of her clients snaps. He says Marjorie's comments are banal, her voice grating, and adds the memorable insult, that it's "rather a blow to be built like an opera singer and have the squeak of a church mouse."